Ten Reasons to Fail at Growth

Facebook's VP of Growth, Alex Schultz, once discussed with Mark Zuckerberg why they succeeded. The answer isn't that they are exceptionally smart or experienced, but rather that they work incredibly hard and execute effectively. Compared to execution, growth is optional. Everyone understands the reasoning; the difference lies in whether people can execute quickly.

Execution is challenging, and there are ten reasons why growth execution fails.

1. Not starting with retention. Growth without retention is like a ring of fire in a wheat field; it will eventually burn out. Without retention, there is no Product-Market Fit (PMF). A sign of achieving PMF is that the retention curve in cohort analysis flattens out.

2. Believing the product is everything. Based on this misconception, people tend to mistakenly focus on "doing more" with the product rather than "doing better" with the existing product. Growth is a process of "doing better." Builders love to create new things, but as a leader, you need to ensure they are at least partially accountable for the results.

3. Looking for a silver bullet. Great products are polished through time and effort spent on details, not conjured up like magic. Good ideas are a byproduct of having many ideas; you can't control the outcome of finding good ideas, but you can create a process that allows more good ideas to emerge.

4. Lack of focus. It's about cutting down one at a time, not chopping at everything in sight. How do you break through the threshold effect here? Remember two points: 1) Most companies' primary scale comes from a single channel, and 2) There are only a few methods to scale; choose one.

5. Insufficient data and analysis. The challenge here is that it's hard to quantify the output of data analysis, so you must firmly believe that this is very valuable, as it enables you to make the right choices.

6. Not enough experimentation, far from it. HubSpot ran thousands of experiments in just six months.

7. Not asking why. When an experiment ends poorly, they just move on to the next one without asking why.

8. Not doubling down on successes. If you find a channel that works exceptionally well and hasn't been fully utilized, continue to invest in it. Zynga discovered that a virtual gift in one game was highly profitable and that viral marketing worked exceptionally well, so they immediately added this feature to all their games.

9. Insufficient resource allocation. Growth requires dedicated teams to focus on it.

10. Unable to embrace change. A company's growth typically goes through three stages: Traction, Transition, Growth. The reasons for success in one stage won't necessarily help you succeed in the next stage.